IF YOU'VE EVER gone shopping for a house or car - or, indeed, anything pretty expensive - you're likely to have given the idea some serious thought.
Buying a house is a pretty serious commitment. It's 30 years (or so) of repayments, and the single biggest purchase that most people will make in their lives.
But the six-figure sum that most people will sweat over committing to in a mortgage pales in comparison to the amount that our public representatives administer on our behalf on a daily basis. Of course, that public money is usually treated with the reverence that it deserves.
But once a year there's an unusual item on the Dáil calendar that seems to fly in the face of good financial governance (at least, unless it's properly understood).
It's the Appropriations Bill - where TDs will approve an entire year's worth of government spending without a vote, and (usually) without even a word of debate.
Basically an Appropriations Act is needed to copper-fasten the government's day-to-day spending for the previous year, and to put it beyond any legal doubt.
Every year when the Budget is announced, a certain amount of money is assigned to individual 'votes' (i.e. parts of the government). The HSE is one vote; the Department of Justice is another, and so on.
But despite the name, these are never actually voted upon on Budget day. The allocation of money is simply announced - and when more money is needed, the Dáil and its committees never actually give an official thumbs-up.
Instead, the extra spending just mounts up without any official legal standing: although there are laws to govern how the State raises money, there's no law determining how that money is spent.
Or, at least, that's the case until the Appropriations Act is passed. The Appropriations Act (or Bill, until it's passed) is the legal item that officially approves the use of state funds for that year.
It's generally passed just before Christmas every year, and acts as the final green light for the spending for the year just finished.
This year the Bill governs spending totaling a mere €43,736,835,000. Yes, that's 43-thousand-7-hundred-million euro - an astonishing amount of money. (To use an example relevant to today, it's enough to buy 465,285,479 tickets to see Beyonce in The O2 in Dublin - the equivalent of filling Croke Park 5,653 times and still having an Aviva's worth of people left standing outside.)
But remarkably, this Bill is usually passed in full in the Dáil in mere seconds, without a single vote or debate. And when you think about it, that's could be a good thing.
Think about the chaos that would unfold if the Oireachtas didn't approve the spending that had already been made. The HSE has spent €13.5 billion delivering health services this year - there could be chaos if it then emerged that this money had been spent without any legal clearance. Likewise, think of what may happen if the money assigned to the Gardaí or the Courts Service needed to be somehow 'undone' - after justice had already been dispensed with.
It's reflective of the way in which the different houses work that there's usually some brief contributions made in the Seanad (where some senators have even gone so far as to demand a vote on passing it) before the Bill is then rushed to the Áras to be signed into law.
So that's the story of how our elected representatives will today approve nearly €44 billion of spending without as much as a word of debate. And in a funny way, how there would probably be hysteria if they didn't.
